Effect of NABr on the Pore Size and Surface Morphology of Cu Foam Prepared by Hydrogen Bubble Templating

Abstract

Binderless supercapacitor electrodes are currently being employed to increase the surface contact between the active material and current collector, leading to enhanced capacitance. In binderless electrodes, the active material is directly grown on the surface of the current collector, omitting the use of insulative polymer-based binders. In this work, Cu foam was successfully electrodeposited on Cu sheet by dynamic hydrogen bubble templating (DHBT) using polyethylene glycol (PEG) and sodium bromide (NaBr) as additives. The current density was set at 3 A·cm-2 and electrodeposition was performed for 20 s. At 200 mg/L PEG, increasing the NaBr concentration from 0 to 80 mM produced Cu foam with decreasing pores sizes of about 75.15 to 34.10 μm. However, the walls of the interconnected pores became thicker as the pore diameters were reduced. This indicates that NaBr promotes Cu deposition rather than hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), leading to smaller pore sizes. X-ray diffraction confirms the oxidation of the Cu foam under ambient conditions forming cuprous oxide (Cu2O). The Cu2O/Cu foam was then utilized as binderless electrode for supercapacitor, resulting to a specific capacitance of 0.815 F·cm-2 at 5 mV·s-1. Results show the potential of the fabricated Cu2O/Cu foam as binderless electrode for pseudo-type supercapacitors.